Mozilla's Open Badge Project | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's Open Badge Project

openbadges.org

43 pointsbenackles17 comments

Why is Mozilla bent upon standardizing everything?

I believe out of a legitimate concern of a few companies taking ownership of the web. If there weren't standards who knows where we would be. Standardization is the reason we all don't live under rules of AOL and Internet Explorer. Now the power has shifted to three dominant players (Apple, Google and Facebook) potential controlling everything. Initiatives to standardize new technologies or trends continues to be important as the web evolves into new areas. Gamification has a lot of space for standardization. Mozilla is a great organization to spearhead new standard initiatives.

The buttons look wrong on my Chrome 19.0.1055.1 dev-m.

http://i.imgur.com/E5mZT.png

Same on 17.0.963.56 m

Your system probably lacks a font that can render the unicode symbol they use: ❯

Can't see it here either: Win7 / Chrome 17

What other providers out there are using this so far? Is there a list of issuers anywhere?

That's a good question. I'm not sure if there's any list of issuers. However, it is an open project and therefore any entity could become an issuer. They list a few possible sources on the FAQ. I think many of the code education startups, such as Code School, Treehouse and Codecademy would be an excellent fit.

[1] http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html

[2] http://codeschool.com

[3] http://teamtreehouse.com

[4] http://codecademy.com

The displayer technical docs give a 404 for me.

Is this gamification of the web?

this is gamification of life

This is an element of gamification. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage people. Within game mechanics there are six components. One component is achievement represented by badges.

I tried it out as it's an interesting concept. Unfortunately, while I can register and also participate in the introductory badges, whenever I try to push to my backpack then confirm who I am, it seems to get stuck on authenticating me forever :(

This is happening for me as well on Firefox 10.0.2.

I was able to get it to work with Chrome; though the user interface had a number of glitches and problems.

"Threat Model

The reason we're even presenting the user with a dialog is because we want to prevent badge spamming, whereby third-party issuers spam a user's backpack with badges that they don't want. Consequently, we need the backpack to ask for the user's consent. This will be accomplished via an iframe embedded in the issuer's page.

The only sensitive information that a user needs to enter in this flow is login credentials. Since authentication is done via BrowserID, which opens in a pop-up window, the consequences of spoof attacks are minimal–so long as the user knows to look at domain names in their address bar and BrowserID's UI."

I was really interested until I got to this part. Asking the user for permission each time I want to award a badge? Complete fail. Mozilla doesn't get UI.

Allowing providers to spam me with badges - complete fail.

I may well be interested in having you award me _a_ badge, but that doesn't mean I want you cluttering things up whenever you feel like it.

Mozilla's policy is that the user has control over their data, and I fully support that.

This is going to be more of a pain in the ass than Vista's Security popup or whatever it's called. It'll be the #1 way to make users hate using your application, I assure you.

Badges need to enhance the application not interrupt it. I have never seen a badge application pause the application to award you with the badge. The entire concept is pretty nuts. It's a good idea, such a shame about the implementation.

Mozilla can easily provide an interface to delete badges you don't want, or ban applications that spam you from the badge system. The whole threat model idea is just self-sabotage.

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